Varied Types eBook

With this distinctively American humour Bret Harte
had little or nothing in common. The wild, sky-breaking
humour of America has its fine qualities, but it must
in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities,
not only of supreme importance to life and letters,
but of supreme importance to humour—­reverence
and sympathy. And these two qualities were knit
into the closest texture of Bret Harte’s humour.
Everyone who has read and enjoyed Mark Twain as he
ought to be read and enjoyed will remember a very
funny and irreverent story about an organist who was
asked to play appropriate music to an address upon
the parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded
to play with great spirit, “We’ll all
get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home.”
The best way of distinguishing Bret Harte from the
rest of American humour is to say that if Bret Harte
had described that scene, it would in some subtle
way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the
incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos
of the theme. You would have felt that the organist’s
tune was funny, but not that the Prodigal Son was
funny. But America is under a kind of despotism
of humour. Everyone is afraid of humour:
the meanest of human nightmares. Bret Harte had,
to express the matter briefly but more or less essentially,
the power of laughing not only at things, but also
with them. America has laughed at things magnificently,
with Gargantuan reverberations of laughter. But
she has not even begun to learn the richer lesson
of laughing with them.

The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had
the instinct of reverence may be found in the fact
that he was a really great parodist. This may
have the appearance of being a paradox, but, as in
the case of many other paradoxes, it is not so important
whether it is a paradox as whether it is not obviously
true. Mere derision, mere contempt, never produced
or could produce parody. A man who simply despises
Paderewski for having long hair is not necessarily
fitted to give an admirable imitation of his particular
touch on the piano. If a man wishes to parody
Paderewski’s style of execution, he must emphatically
go through one process first: he must admire
it, and even reverence it. Bret Harte had a real
power of imitating great authors, as in his parodies
on Dumas, on Victor Hugo, on Charlotte Bronte.
This means, and can only mean, that he had perceived
the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas and Victor
Hugo and Charlotte Bronte. To take an example,
Bret Harte has in his imitation of Hugo a passage
like this:

“M. Madeline was, if possible, better than
M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an angel. M. Madeline
was a good man.” I do not know whether Victor
Hugo ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that
he would have used it and thanked his stars if he
had thought of it. This is real parody, inseparable
from admiration. It is the same in the parody
of Dumas, which is arranged on the system of “Aramis